Ned Marcus
Inkling
With self-publishing it depends how good you are at marketing. How good you want to become.
Oh definitely! I'm aware it'll be a ton of work to make it a successful venture, and I haven't researched too deeply into the ins and outs of it. I just thought it was worth a mention in case it was something the OP hasn't considered and would have been of interest.I didn't watch the episode (I will at some point), but I think the main issue with selling direct is that it's very hard to scale it unless you put a lot of effort into it.
The thing with other platforms is that they reward you for sales. If you go to one of my novels on Amazon, then at the bottom of the page you'll see a reference "readers of this book also bought", where it shows part 2 in the series. But also if you go to a few other books from other authors you'll find my novel there. Amazon also sends out emails to buyers advertising their next book. The more sales you get, the higher you'll rank in certain results and so on.
All this means that the more I sell on Amazon the more organic sales I'll get.
Selling direct this is a lot harder. I could create a website that attracts a lot of natural traffic. That would take a lot of time and effort though. Otherwise, I'll be reduced to always spending money on ads to drive traffic there. And if I'm doing that, then maybe sending them to a store where they have shopped before makes me more money. People are more likely to buy from Amazon than from some random online website.
What I've heard of other authors is that for most of them, direct sales plateau at a certain level, simply because they can't drive more traffic to their own website easily.
Also, having a website that sells stuff internationally can actually be quite the hassle. Don't underestimate how much work running a succesful webshop is.